I've got a few flashlight bulbs made from big LEDs - they're only red and orange, but they're pretty bright, and they can last about a week with a pair of D batteries, if you accidentally leave it on the whole time. (Of course, now I need to get new batteries...) Instructions to make your own are Here.
Uhh, yeah I read that too, but I still haven't parsed any meaning from it. What difference did releasing it a few days early make? "Symbolic step" sounds to me like it was for the PR.
Yup, that's a pretty good summary of what the paragraph means. It comes down to "People are saying not-nice-things about us, and we wanted the spotlight for a second so that we would have a chance to refute them and actually be heard."
While it may be true that (in some cases) the fact that they were charging for it enabled it to be accepted more readily than otherwise, (think old style managers of big non-technical firms here - no tech knowlege, and if it's expensive, it must be better,) there came (and went) a point where they were doing more harm than good by over-charging, and preventing smaller companies from entering a market which they had a very effective stranglehold on. (Ie:Netwscape and Explorer both use RSA for secure web transactions).
So really, all they're doing here, is a "We're actually the good guys here!", combined with a "It didn't get taken away from us, we gave it away!" - A last minute attempt to save face so they can get the tech industry to trust them again, at least long enough for them to sneak yet another convenient patented technology into as many public standards as they can, and get it widely adopted so they can once again drive up the price and extort ludicrous ammounts of money from anyone who wants to enter the playing field. Hopefully this time the people setting the standards will know better.
Heh, just because they were in charge of it before, dosen't mean they've got it now. (damn. It was much less cluttered with crap back then too.) 'Scuse me, I think I'll go have a USEnet-flashback now... (woah... content...)
You know, it's funny, but I was thinking the same thing about Yesmail, but more in terms of doing it for the attention that the inevitable overblown media frenzy on such a trial would produce - they can even lose the lawsuit, and fix their mailing list the way the MAPS people wanted to afterwards, and the increased attention may profit them more than the costs of the lawyers. As long as they maintain a very vocal and loud set of protestations about how they did no wrong, and they're a decent, respectable web buisness (and our address is www.... - go see!) then they can get all of the free big-time media coverage that they want, and can use it for advertizing.
Yeah, there's a nice, easy fix to that though - if you've got virtual mail servers compiled into your sendmail, you can set any non-valid email address to fall into the bit-bucket without bouncing. Of course, that's a bit of a pain for people who make a lot of typos, since they'll never know that their email didn't go through, so I wouldn't recommend it unless you knew someone was trying to use that method to sniff accounts on your system. It may not prevent them from getting the real accounts, but finding them in the 2 or 3 megs of bad ones probably won't be worth their while, and they'll most likely throw out that batch. (Or they'll publish their list, and get sued for fraud by spammers when 99.9999999% of the addresses are fake...:)
I set it to send all of the bad addresses sent to my server to a single account for a few days, and I was amazed at the number of "Nospam(userid)@..." addresses that were getting sent stuff.
Yeah, right. That's the spirit. "Mine! Mine! Mine!". This is exactly how the internet was built in the first place...
Well, yeah, actually, it was a U.S. Military project to protect their network data from loss, and improve communications - if anything qualifies as a "Mine! Mine! Mine!" organization, that would be it. It wasn't until all the philosophically inclined (read: hippie;) University researchers and students got their hands on it that it became a "Sharing is good!" thing...
First, and foremost, anyone who actually winds up on the list is there because they chose to be there. They chose to 'run their mail server as an open relay', they chose to 'run their buisness through spamming', or even they chose to 'run a mailing list that dosen't require a conformation for subscription'. Thing is, they get a whole MONTH warning ahead of time, and free assistance in fixing the problem if there is one. If they then CHOOSE not to fix the problem, then they are on the list, plain and simple.
Second, they don't even go after people unless they have recieved complaints about them, and have investigated those complaints and found them to be valid. If they get an open relay reported to them, the first thing they do is verify it. If they get complaints of spamming, they check to see if there realy is a problem, and once again, they don't immediately drop them into the killfile, they discuss the matter with the person who has been accused, and try fix the problem if possible. And fixing the verification problem with a properly built mailing list program is easy if you're using something like MajorDomo, it's the default setting once you properly install it. The people who don't do things right are typically using spamware, or poorly configured systems, and they can get free help fixing it if they're willing to listen.
Unfortunately, there are some people out there who don't listen, don't care, or want to have something to fight about. After all, court fights make great publicity. I wonder how much yesmail.com's web trafic has gone up since they filed this lawsuit? Do you really think they're not profiting from the increased attention?
Re:Whatever you watch, NEVER watch dubs!
on
Essential Anime
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· Score: 1
I dunno, there are some dubs that are really bad (BGC), some that could use improvement (Slayers. Sad, but I can't stand a few of the english voices they use. ARGH!), some that are fair/Ok (Tenchi), and some that are pretty good (Cowboy Beebop). Of course, those are just from among the Anime I've seen both in. (Well, I only survived about a minute of the BGC dub before I shut it off, and wiped the tape it was on. The people responsible for it need to be taken out into the street and heckled to death. But I've seen both Dub and Sub of the others.)
Then there's Ranma 1/2. I've only seen two episodes dubbed, which were Ok, and the rest of the series was in straight Japanese, no subtitles. Strangely enough, not knowing much Japanese didn't interfere with understanding what was going on in it...
Golden boy is a comedy about a guy doesn't get into the college he wants to go to
Actually, he did get into the college he wanted, he just decided to leave without graduating, after finishing all of the course requirements. The most memorable quote from the whole series - "I know those..."
One bit of advice - if you can, watch Lost Universe before Slayers Try. It's not just done by the same people (ie: writers, AND voices), it is supposedly part of the same series. Knowing all of what happens in Slayers Try kinda messes things up for you if you watch Lost Universe afterwards...
Bubblegum Crisis/Crash isn't bad--try to view the original series first, and AVOID THE GODDAMN DUBS LIKE THE PLAGUE.
I couldn't agree more there. The original sound track is awesome.
"Bubblegum Crisis 2040"... I miss the lesbian references, though...we all know Sylia Stingray and especially Nene are flaming. Out of the closet, girls;)
Dude... I think you'd better watch those four episodes over if you missed Sylia trying to feel up everyone she walked near. It was like they turned her into a grown-up Alielle (from El-Hazard), wearing the not-grown-up Alielle's (very small) clothing.
Re:Tenchi Muyo - it's never that simple...
on
Essential Anime
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· Score: 1
I swear to Goddess (Tsunami?)
Actually, in Pretty Sammy, she's not a goddess, just a REALLY ditzy queen of a magical kingdom. Or something.
Of course, at least she's still passably competent, which is better than what they do to Ifurita in the El-Hazard TV series. Yeesh... talk about falling from grace. From cool, grim and deadly bad-ass war machine in the OAVs, to bubbleheaded moron in the TV series.
thinking that everything is good-which it certainly not the case.
Very true. There is also a lot of bad anime out there. For example, at the top of my personal 'Avoid this under any circumstances' list, is Tenshi Ni Naruman (or something like that.) Trust me on this, you DON'T want to see it. It's just... wrong. The scary part is that the friend who got the tape actually liked it, and wanted to get more. *shudder*
Another good thing about Eva in this case, is that people who like the examples that Cmdr. Taco listed are likely to enjoy it as well, whereas some other Anime like Slayers (my personal favourite) or Fushigi Yuugi may not necesarily apeal to them as much.
Besides, there's something really cool about mecha with giant power cords.
Re:Tenchi Muyo - it's never that simple...
on
Essential Anime
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· Score: 1
Only bad part is that Tenchi is not one, but at least 3 series (plus spin-offs, plus...). Of the three, CN is going to air them in the following order, IIRC:
Tenchi Universe (aka Tenchi TV1)
Shin Tenchi (aka Tenchi TV2; the least-liked of the three)
Tenchi Muyo! Ryo-Ohki (aka Tenchi OAV; the series that started it all and that many fans seem to think is the best...except that it isn't finished, yet).
Oh no, it's not that simple... It's never that simple... As far as I recall, there's the above, PLUS three movies (using two separate continuities) PLUS there's also Pretty Sammy! (for the truely broken...) which takes even the most basic common elements from the other Tenchi series, and mangles the heck out of them. Also, there's the Manga, which follows the example set by the Anime, by ignoring all of it.
So let's see... that makes 7 or so different (ie: conflicting and non-compatible) story lines, spread across 8 available 'Tenchi' products. (By the way, movies 1 and 3 follow the same continuity, movie 2 is separate, and trying to fit it into the others will only hurt you...)
I love helpdesk. I've been doing helpdesk duties as either part, or all of my job(s) for the last 8 years. First at my University, and now out here in the Real World(tm), and I've looked at how some other companies handle their helpdesks as well.
I've found that the size of the helpdesk staff needed isn't just a function of how many people you have in your user base. You also have to consider the dificulty of what the users are going to be doing most of the time, and the mentality of the users themselves.
When I was at the University, they had constantly breaking down, antiquated machines in some Prof's offices, along with a massive number of new users every 4 months, all of whom had to get used to new things like Email, Word Processing, and sharing the printers with everyone else in the 100+ computer lab. This resulted in massive headaches, and a need for a lot of support staff. We had something like 6 to 9 full time staff doing support, as well as at least two or three part time students on duty at any one time, and it still wasn't always enough during the busy times.
Now I work at an ISP, and we give our new users a CD which can do their dialin setup for them, so we spend about 6 hours (total, for everyone) a week doing helpdesk duties, with a userbase of over 1200. Most of the calls involve things like:
User: I can't log in! It won't take my password! Helpdesk: Is your caps lock on? User: Oops...
User: I can't log in! Did your server crash? Helpdesk: No, your account was shut down, because you told us you wanted it cut off yesterday. User: Well, I changed my mind!
User: My computer crashed, and now it won't even dial up to you guys! Helpdesk: Have you still got the CD we gave you? Put it in your computer, and run the 'setup.exe' program.
Well, I don't know if it really is, but according to Mr. Weston's letter: This email notification is a statement made under penalty of perjury that we are the copyright owner of the referenced Specification, that we are acting in good faith, and that the above-referenced comments, as part of http://www.slashdot.org, is posting proprietary material without express written permission.
Which means, that he says it is. And while I may not be a lawyer, I get the feeling that as Microsoft's "Designated Agent", he is. And since the above referenced comments included one that does nothing of the sort that they claim, that means he, or Microsoft, are liable, according to his professional opinion.
ok, obviously your ignorant (doesnt mean your dumb, though that is highly likely) You think its slow, what about the P2 with a 300MHZ proc? check out the facts and specs before you judge moron
Speaking of checking out the facts before judging... according to this, the Playstation 2 has a 128bit processor. 128 bits at 300MHz is still a wee bit more than 32 bits at 600MHz (The X-Box uses a PIII processor, which is only 32 bit...) Funny how MS never mentions that in their comparison charts...
Re:I'm raising my daughter to be a girl geek
on
Girls Like Linux Too
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· Score: 2
My neice (3 yrs) was mad because her new (pre) school won't let her use the computer by herself, and they said they don't have an internet connection. Kinda sad, since she knows more about it than my mother. ("No Nana, you put the cd in here and push there!")
Clearly Paramount has been taking sequel-naming lessons from the makers of the animé series Slayers...
Gee, if they take more than just naming conventions from slayers, we'll get: 1: Every other episode starting in a restaurant 2: Lotsa big explosions when the characters need to vent stress 3: Only one (marginaly) sane character in the whole series, who procedes to get tromped on by everyone else. 4: A really cool soundtrack?
(Yes, I just watched the entire 3rd season of Slayers (Slayers: Try) yesterday... I'm sick.)
Hey! It's only 49.9% right now, thankyouverymuch! It won't be 50% until the next politician decides that he needs a raise and dosen't feel like cutting any social programs to pay for it.
Join the weather channel. They don't think Canada "exists" either (the weather just *stops* at the border!).
Nope, if you look at those weather channel maps closely, you'll see that everything north of the U.S. border is white, which is because everything north of the U.S. border is burried under a ton of snow. (Honest! I can't even see out my window because of all that snow, and it's on the second floor! Really!) How exactly we manage to have that much snow when it's so darn hot out is beyond me, but when I look north across the border, I see that Detroit hasn't got any snow at all. Weird, eh? (For those who don't know, Detroit (in Michigan) is north of Windsor (in Canada).)
That is, say you're "logged on to the Internet" 18 hours/day, but that you've never lied to anyone about it, or felt guilty or whatever. See what they make of THAT.
Um, but that's the truth... wouldn't that mean their statistics would be more accurate?
No kidding. I felt kinda embarased putting in that 99% of the time I spend at a computer is time spent 'online', but it's true, sometimes the computer is off while I change a card, but I work at an ISP dammit, I'm always online...
You're not supposed to understand, but rather feel it, on a deeper level.
Oh, I felt it alright... ouch. I realy must wonder though about the design on the site - it's totaly unreadable to people browsing at 640x480 (the middle frame, where everything happens gets cut down to nothing) And yet, people who browse at that resolution probably can't afford the $3500 for the chair, so I guess they're not missing much.:) Still, whoever designed that eyesore of a site would have failed the www class I used to teach. Yech!
One thing I would like to know though - what the heck is that air-bag thing they're advertizing on their products page? (beside the chairs and the lamps) It's like, some kinda inflatable pillow with straps or something. I guess I'm just not artsy enough to understand.
Slashdot Mirror
I've got a few flashlight bulbs made from big LEDs - they're only red and orange, but they're pretty bright, and they can last about a week with a pair of D batteries, if you accidentally leave it on the whole time. (Of course, now I need to get new batteries...) Instructions to make your own are Here.
Yup, that's a pretty good summary of what the paragraph means. It comes down to "People are saying not-nice-things about us, and we wanted the spotlight for a second so that we would have a chance to refute them and actually be heard."
While it may be true that (in some cases) the fact that they were charging for it enabled it to be accepted more readily than otherwise, (think old style managers of big non-technical firms here - no tech knowlege, and if it's expensive, it must be better,) there came (and went) a point where they were doing more harm than good by over-charging, and preventing smaller companies from entering a market which they had a very effective stranglehold on. (Ie:Netwscape and Explorer both use RSA for secure web transactions).
So really, all they're doing here, is a "We're actually the good guys here!", combined with a "It didn't get taken away from us, we gave it away!" - A last minute attempt to save face so they can get the tech industry to trust them again, at least long enough for them to sneak yet another convenient patented technology into as many public standards as they can, and get it widely adopted so they can once again drive up the price and extort ludicrous ammounts of money from anyone who wants to enter the playing field. Hopefully this time the people setting the standards will know better.
Heh, just because they were in charge of it before, dosen't mean they've got it now. (damn. It was much less cluttered with crap back then too.)
'Scuse me, I think I'll go have a USEnet-flashback now... (woah... content...)
You know, it's funny, but I was thinking the same thing about Yesmail, but more in terms of doing it for the attention that the inevitable overblown media frenzy on such a trial would produce - they can even lose the lawsuit, and fix their mailing list the way the MAPS people wanted to afterwards, and the increased attention may profit them more than the costs of the lawyers. As long as they maintain a very vocal and loud set of protestations about how they did no wrong, and they're a decent, respectable web buisness (and our address is www.... - go see!) then they can get all of the free big-time media coverage that they want, and can use it for advertizing.
Yeah, there's a nice, easy fix to that though - if you've got virtual mail servers compiled into your sendmail, you can set any non-valid email address to fall into the bit-bucket without bouncing. Of course, that's a bit of a pain for people who make a lot of typos, since they'll never know that their email didn't go through, so I wouldn't recommend it unless you knew someone was trying to use that method to sniff accounts on your system. It may not prevent them from getting the real accounts, but finding them in the 2 or 3 megs of bad ones probably won't be worth their while, and they'll most likely throw out that batch. (Or they'll publish their list, and get sued for fraud by spammers when 99.9999999% of the addresses are fake... :)
I set it to send all of the bad addresses sent to my server to a single account for a few days, and I was amazed at the number of "Nospam(userid)@..." addresses that were getting sent stuff.
Well, yeah, actually, it was a U.S. Military project to protect their network data from loss, and improve communications - if anything qualifies as a "Mine! Mine! Mine!" organization, that would be it. It wasn't until all the philosophically inclined (read: hippie ;) University researchers and students got their hands on it that it became a "Sharing is good!" thing...
Second, they don't even go after people unless they have recieved complaints about them, and have investigated those complaints and found them to be valid. If they get an open relay reported to them, the first thing they do is verify it. If they get complaints of spamming, they check to see if there realy is a problem, and once again, they don't immediately drop them into the killfile, they discuss the matter with the person who has been accused, and try fix the problem if possible. And fixing the verification problem with a properly built mailing list program is easy if you're using something like MajorDomo, it's the default setting once you properly install it. The people who don't do things right are typically using spamware, or poorly configured systems, and they can get free help fixing it if they're willing to listen.
Unfortunately, there are some people out there who don't listen, don't care, or want to have something to fight about. After all, court fights make great publicity. I wonder how much yesmail.com's web trafic has gone up since they filed this lawsuit? Do you really think they're not profiting from the increased attention?
Then there's Ranma 1/2. I've only seen two episodes dubbed, which were Ok, and the rest of the series was in straight Japanese, no subtitles. Strangely enough, not knowing much Japanese didn't interfere with understanding what was going on in it...
Actually, he did get into the college he wanted, he just decided to leave without graduating, after finishing all of the course requirements. The most memorable quote from the whole series - "I know those..."
One bit of advice - if you can, watch Lost Universe before Slayers Try. It's not just done by the same people (ie: writers, AND voices), it is supposedly part of the same series. Knowing all of what happens in Slayers Try kinda messes things up for you if you watch Lost Universe afterwards...
Bubblegum Crisis/Crash isn't bad--try to view the original series first, and AVOID THE GODDAMN DUBS LIKE THE PLAGUE.
I couldn't agree more there. The original sound track is awesome.
"Bubblegum Crisis 2040" ... I miss the lesbian references, though...we all know Sylia Stingray and especially Nene are flaming. Out of the closet, girls ;)
Dude... I think you'd better watch those four episodes over if you missed Sylia trying to feel up everyone she walked near. It was like they turned her into a grown-up Alielle (from El-Hazard), wearing the not-grown-up Alielle's (very small) clothing.
Actually, in Pretty Sammy, she's not a goddess, just a REALLY ditzy queen of a magical kingdom. Or something.
Of course, at least she's still passably competent, which is better than what they do to Ifurita in the El-Hazard TV series. Yeesh... talk about falling from grace. From cool, grim and deadly bad-ass war machine in the OAVs, to bubbleheaded moron in the TV series.
You scare me.
Very true. There is also a lot of bad anime out there. For example, at the top of my personal 'Avoid this under any circumstances' list, is Tenshi Ni Naruman (or something like that.) Trust me on this, you DON'T want to see it. It's just... wrong. The scary part is that the friend who got the tape actually liked it, and wanted to get more. *shudder*
Another good thing about Eva in this case, is that people who like the examples that Cmdr. Taco listed are likely to enjoy it as well, whereas some other Anime like Slayers (my personal favourite) or Fushigi Yuugi may not necesarily apeal to them as much.
Besides, there's something really cool about mecha with giant power cords.
Oh no, it's not that simple... It's never that simple...
As far as I recall, there's the above, PLUS three movies (using two separate continuities) PLUS there's also Pretty Sammy! (for the truely broken...) which takes even the most basic common elements from the other Tenchi series, and mangles the heck out of them. Also, there's the Manga, which follows the example set by the Anime, by ignoring all of it.
So let's see... that makes 7 or so different (ie: conflicting and non-compatible) story lines, spread across 8 available 'Tenchi' products. (By the way, movies 1 and 3 follow the same continuity, movie 2 is separate, and trying to fit it into the others will only hurt you...)
I've found that the size of the helpdesk staff needed isn't just a function of how many people you have in your user base. You also have to consider the dificulty of what the users are going to be doing most of the time, and the mentality of the users themselves.
When I was at the University, they had constantly breaking down, antiquated machines in some Prof's offices, along with a massive number of new users every 4 months, all of whom had to get used to new things like Email, Word Processing, and sharing the printers with everyone else in the 100+ computer lab. This resulted in massive headaches, and a need for a lot of support staff. We had something like 6 to 9 full time staff doing support, as well as at least two or three part time students on duty at any one time, and it still wasn't always enough during the busy times.
Now I work at an ISP, and we give our new users a CD which can do their dialin setup for them, so we spend about 6 hours (total, for everyone) a week doing helpdesk duties, with a userbase of over 1200. Most of the calls involve things like:
Helpdesk: Is your caps lock on?
User: Oops...
Helpdesk: No, your account was shut down, because you told us you wanted it cut off yesterday. User: Well, I changed my mind!
Helpdesk: Have you still got the CD we gave you? Put it in your computer, and run the 'setup.exe' program.
Well, I don't know if it really is, but according to Mr. Weston's letter:
This email notification is a statement made under penalty of perjury that we are the copyright owner of the referenced Specification, that we are acting in good faith, and that the above-referenced comments, as part of http://www.slashdot.org, is posting proprietary material without express written permission.
Which means, that he says it is. And while I may not be a lawyer, I get the feeling that as Microsoft's "Designated Agent", he is. And since the above referenced comments included one that does nothing of the sort that they claim, that means he, or Microsoft, are liable, according to his professional opinion.
Speaking of checking out the facts before judging... according to this, the Playstation 2 has a 128bit processor. 128 bits at 300MHz is still a wee bit more than 32 bits at 600MHz (The X-Box uses a PIII processor, which is only 32 bit...) Funny how MS never mentions that in their comparison charts...
My neice (3 yrs) was mad because her new (pre) school won't let her use the computer by herself, and they said they don't have an internet connection. Kinda sad, since she knows more about it than my mother. ("No Nana, you put the cd in here and push there!")
Clearly Paramount has been taking sequel-naming lessons from the makers of the animé series Slayers ...
Gee, if they take more than just naming conventions from slayers, we'll get:
1: Every other episode starting in a restaurant
2: Lotsa big explosions when the characters need to vent stress
3: Only one (marginaly) sane character in the whole series, who procedes to get tromped on by everyone else.
4: A really cool soundtrack?
(Yes, I just watched the entire 3rd season of Slayers (Slayers: Try) yesterday... I'm sick.)
What are the other reasons ?? 50 % tax rate ?
Hey! It's only 49.9% right now, thankyouverymuch!
It won't be 50% until the next politician decides that he needs a raise and dosen't feel like cutting any social programs to pay for it.
Now that we've got this giant "library-in-a-second" capacity, we've got to fill it with piles of encrypted traffic.
But this is Canada... our government encourages that sort of thing...
Join the weather channel. They don't think Canada "exists" either (the weather just *stops* at the border!).
Nope, if you look at those weather channel maps closely, you'll see that everything north of the U.S. border is white, which is because everything north of the U.S. border is burried under a ton of snow. (Honest! I can't even see out my window because of all that snow, and it's on the second floor! Really!) How exactly we manage to have that much snow when it's so darn hot out is beyond me, but when I look north across the border, I see that Detroit hasn't got any snow at all. Weird, eh?
(For those who don't know, Detroit (in Michigan) is north of Windsor (in Canada).)
That is, say you're "logged on to the Internet" 18 hours/day, but that you've never lied to anyone about it, or felt guilty or whatever. See what they make of THAT.
Um, but that's the truth... wouldn't that mean their statistics would be more accurate?
No kidding. I felt kinda embarased putting in that 99% of the time I spend at a computer is time spent 'online', but it's true, sometimes the computer is off while I change a card, but I work at an ISP dammit, I'm always online...
You're not supposed to understand, but rather feel it, on a deeper level.
:)
Oh, I felt it alright... ouch. I realy must wonder though about the design on the site - it's totaly unreadable to people browsing at 640x480 (the middle frame, where everything happens gets cut down to nothing) And yet, people who browse at that resolution probably can't afford the $3500 for the chair, so I guess they're not missing much.
Still, whoever designed that eyesore of a site would have failed the www class I used to teach. Yech!
One thing I would like to know though - what the heck is that air-bag thing they're advertizing on their products page? (beside the chairs and the lamps) It's like, some kinda inflatable pillow with straps or something. I guess I'm just not artsy enough to understand.